Updated 6:24 pm, Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Intelligence suggesting the campaign against ISIS is not going well is said to have been downplayed or ignored.

THE STAKES:

As we've seen in past wars, denying reality is deadly.

We can win the war in Vietnam. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. In hindsight, the hubris seems so painfully obvious.

We seem to be witnessing that sort of misguided confidence again in the boldly named Operation Inherent Resolve, in which the Islamic State — a group President Barack Obama once dismissed as a junior varsity team — continues to thwart the campaign to degrade and destroy it.

At the root of this continuing, metastasizing conflict may be one of the most deadly failures of all: a refusal to heed intelligence analysts whose assessments aren't rosy enough.

ISIS, as the group is also known, has proven to be anything but JV. Making full use of the Internet, it has recruited far and wide and waged a potent propaganda campaign, publicizing mass beheadings and the destruction of antiquities. It has surfaced well beyond Syria and Iraq. Further complicating the situation, al-Qaida is mixed up in this fight, too. And now, Russia is actively stepping into the conflict to bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose removal is part of the U.S. strategy.

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To hear U.S. officials tell it just a few months ago, this was all going to be fairly simple: Identify and support Syrian moderates, cut a swath up the middle of Syria, divide and conquer al-Qaida and ISIS, and then replace Mr. Assad with a moderate government.

It didn't work out that way. A key feature of this strategy, a $500 million effort to train and equip a force of 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels, has resulted in perhaps four or five.

How did this go so wrong? It didn't happen overnight, as sudden as the news seemed to be. There were doubts about the program early on. And, perhaps more gravely, negative intelligence assessments of the campaign against ISIS were, according to people in the intelligence community, downplayed or discouraged, The New York Times reports.

Whether that was the result of political pressure from the Obama administration or institutional pressure in the military chain of command isn't clear. But this much is clear: Congress must find out. This is not some politically manufactured controversy like the endless Benghazi investigation. This is the stuff that loses wars, or keeps America fighting lost causes.

It's not the politicians who bear the consequences of bad wartime decisions, but the young people who put their lives on the line in the belief that their country is doing the right thing. We lost more than 58,000 of them in Vietnam in part because of presidents and generals who kept predicting victory. We lost almost 4,500 in Iraq in no small measure due to misinformation about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and a fantasy that we would be greeted as liberators.

So far, Operation Inherent Resolve has claimed three U.S. military lives, though not directly in combat.

If America is going to continue this war, intelligence is the first thing it needs to get right, a lesson as old as war itself. No one should be the next to die for a mistake.